My Lobotomy:

A Memoir

By: Howard Dully and Charles Fleming
288 pp. Crown, 2007; $24.95

Reviewed by Celene Carillo

When Howard Dully was twelve years old, he was given a transorbital lobotomy by Walter Freeman, the doctor who pioneered the procedure in the US with all the theatrics one would expect from a nineteenth century medicine show.  Dully’s operation lasted ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.  Freeman used a leucotome, an instrument much like an ice pick, which he inserted into Dully’s eye socket in order to reach the boy’s frontal lobe.  Freeman twirled the leucotome through Dully’s brain – the doctor had become adept at using the tool because he frequently practiced on cantaloupes – and pronounced Dully cured.

Dully spent his next forty years trying to understand what he had done to deserve it.  “I thought about my lobotomy all the time, but I never talked about it.  It was my terrible secret.  What had been so wrong with me?” he writes.  

Dully’s question is the locus of his memoir, My Lobotomy, which he coauthored with novelist and nonfiction writer Charles Fleming.  To try and answer it, Dully reaches back into an often lonely, cruel childhood, complete with a stepmother who, for unfathomable reasons, could not tolerate him and a distant father who did nothing to protect him against her.  Dully’s own story takes his readers into his troubled adolescence, which he spent in and out of mental hospitals, foster homes and juvenile hall.  Adulthood wasn’t any easier – no one had ever taught him how to live, and Dully frequently found himself homeless, jailed and battling addiction.   

But it was Dully’s association with National Public Radio’s Sound Portraits team that led him to Freeman’s archives at George Washington University, and, finally, some perspective.  The material Dully delved into while working on an NPR radio documentary about his life informs My Lobotomy and also gave Dully his first glance at what his stepmother, father and Dr. Freeman were thinking when they allowed him to undergo his operation. 

Dully invites readers into Freeman’s notes, in which Dully’s stepmother becomes ever more inventive in her list of complaints against her stepson, if only to let Freeman convince her that lobotomy was the only answer.  “I learned from Mrs. Dully, when Mr. Dully was out, that Howard is suspected of having beaten his baby brother nearly to death since the infant was found in its crib with its skull fractured and its chest caved in,” Freeman wrote.

Ultimately, My Lobotomy is a story about what happens when a child is failed by every adult and institution set up to foster him, and what happens when a physician’s authority goes unchecked.  Freeman wasn’t even a psychiatrist, yet was able to diagnose Dully a schizophrenic and have the boy admitted into the Los Altos, California hospital where he performed the procedure.  My Lobotomy, even with Fleming, is not a lyrical book, but the blunt, no-frills style with which Dully describes the procedure and subsequent haze of his life is a good match for the brutal decisions that defined him for so long. Dully manages to be a deeply personal narrator, too, and his story incites almost as much sorrow as it does anger.  It’s hard to believe procedures like that were ever allowed, until, of course, one remembers that today more children than ever are taking psychotropic drugs, most of which weren’t prescribed by psychiatrists, either.